Narendra Kumar

Educator/Teacher

I am an educator currently working as an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur, India. Born in a small village in India in 1978, and with initial struggles to have access to education for schooling, I graduated from the University of Rajasthan with a degree in English, Philosophy and Sanskrit. I went on to do Masters and PhD in English from the same University. My doctoral research work has been on the fiction of Caribbean-British writer, Caryl Phillips. Through this, I explored the complex narratives engaging with race, ethnicity and history from the vantage ground of postcoloniality. I started my teaching career as a lecturer from an Engineering institution as a language teacher and soft-skills trainer in 2004. After completing my PhD, I joined the Department of English at the University of Jammu (Bhaderwah Campus) in 2010 to teach Masters students. My stay at this place, even though for a short period of two and a half years, was a watershed event bringing me closer to the reality of conflict in Kashmir. The enormous presence of armed personnel, the half-burned houses, the physical marks of grenade attacks at different places including the central marketplace and the memory of people, tainted with anguish and anxiety, conveyed in quiet expressions brought me face to face with what a people can suffer if the nation-building remains an incomplete project. The place, known as Chhota Kashmir (Mini-Kashmir), harboured the idyllic beauty of Kashmir with its snow-capped surrounding hills, sky-aspiring and sweet-smelling Deodars, Orchids of Apple and Walnut, sparkling water from the Himalayas and a twinking night-sky, a dream for anybody moving from an urban centre in Rajasthan. However, at the same time, it did bosom the pain of Kashmir. The district headquarter, Doda, known for a heinous massacre was just a few miles away. My post-doctoral research commitments took roots here and I challenged myself to know the place and its predicament better through its literature. It took a shape of a research project in 2014 that I did with the financial support from the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), New Delhi. My journal and conference publications, thus, have centred around identity politics and identities-in-conflict located in various geographies and temporalities. Meanwhile, I joined The LNM Institute of Information Technology, Jaipur in July 2012 to once again continue a dialogue with the engineering students, however, with a change this time - not as a language trainer but - as a contributor to learning in the domain of humanities and social sciences. At this institute, I am also connected to the organization of various student events fostering a dialogue to disseminate ideas through the Student Media Club. The common membership among the club members and TedxLNMIIT 2019 team brought me close to Tedx as an organiser imparting an experience of managing the event along with students in its various facets. I love travelling and photography and have recently started a blog (www.aadiandanaadi.wordpress.com) to organise and share my work.

Ethnic Conflict, Literature of the Indian Subcontinent, Postcolonial Studies